RECOMMENDED READING: “Muslim Brotherhood Leader Ismail Faruqi Highlighted The Role Of Muslim Immigration In The Islamization Of North America”

The Point de Bascule blog has published an analysis of the views concern Muslim immigration to Broth America held by the late U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader Ismail Faruqi. The analysis begins:

In 1980, the symposium Dimensions of Islam in North America was held at the University of Alberta (Edmonton). Ismail Faruqi spoke at the event. His lecture was entitled Islamic Ideals in North America. It focused on the mission that he envisioned for Muslim immigrants. According to Faruqi, Muslims immigrants have two duties:

1. Calling non-Muslims to Islam; 2. Transforming the North American reality so that it conforms to Islamic standards.

According to Faruqi, peoples already living in the West must be ‘turn(ed) away from their past evil.’ He concluded by saying that ‘Nothing would be greater than these (…) peoples of the West marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar!’ Faruqi’s goal was nothing less than the Islamization of North America. In 1977, Faruqi, Youssef Qaradawi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders met in Lugano (Switzerland) to establish the basis of what would become the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) four years later. Since then, the IIIT has become the main Muslim Brotherhood research institute in the West. Based in Herndon (Pennsylvania), IIIT provides Islamist operatives in North America and elsewhere the theoretical resources to implement sharia in their non-Muslim environment and transform the institutions where they live in accordance with Islamic standards. When Faruqi mentions that Muslim immigrants should consider their new country as their own Medina, he alludes to the fact that, according to Muslim historians, at the beginning of Islam, Muhammad and his supporters had to migrate from Mecca to Medina before being able to substantially increase their influence and conquer territories. Nowadays, asking a Muslim to consider his new country like a Medina is a metaphor for asking him to Islamize the area where he lives and its surroundings. In these circumstances, when Western government agencies rely on Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations and subsidize them to ‘integrate’ Muslim immigrants, they accomplish exactly the opposite. They encourage the ghettoisation of new immigrants and the Islamization of their own countries.

In February, the Point de Bascule blog has published a profile of the late U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. leader Ismail Faruqi centered on his activities in Canada.

In July 1986, a Montreal Gazette reader wrote to the editor to complain that the assassination of Muslim leader Ismail Faruqi in Pennsylvania had been “deliberately left out” of the newspaper. He was particularly upset since Faruqi had been a leading figure of the Montreal Muslim community from 1958 until 1967. “When a member of the Moslem community is a victim of terrorism, there is no coverage,” he complained. “But you (the media) choose to print news that portrays Moslems as terrorists.” At the time, this Gazette reader also contacted the Muslim Community of Quebec on Chester Avenue in Montreal (also Canada Revenue Agency) to express his indignation. Agreeing with the Gazette reader, MCQ president Mohammed Amin claimed that the lack of coverage was part of a pattern of “biased reporting of the media in general and of The Gazette in particular.” Clair Balfour, the Gazette’s ombudsman, rejected the claim of “anti-Muslim bias” (the term Islamophobia had not yet been invented by the Muslim Brotherhood). He concluded that the lack of coverage was understandable given the fact that Faruqi was not an international newsmaker. No major press agencies on which The Gazette relied for its information had alluded to Faruqi’s activities in Montreal, added the ombudsman. Once informed about the Montreal connection though, the Gazette’s ombudsman took the time to investigate Faruqi’s activities. On July 31, 1986, he published his findings in an article entitled Islamic Scholar Slain in U.S. Was Figure in Montreal (also scan of the original article).

A previous post reported that in August 2010, a Georgetown Professor presented the Annual Isma’il Faruqi Lecture at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Another earlier post discussed the international conference on Dr. Faruqi that was held by IIIT and organized jointly by IIIT, the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSID), the University of Westminister, UK, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, University, USA.

A Hudson Institute report explains that Al-Faruqi, a Temple University professor who had been an activist with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), played a pivotal role in the founding of IIIT and that that it was al-Faruqi who secured $25 million from the Saudi Islamic Development Bank in order to establish IIIT. Al-Faruqi is probably best known for his concept of the “Islamization of Knowledge” described as follows:

Al-Faruqi attempted to articulate an Islamic worldview by fortifying it with ration- al and scientific arguments. In the latter part of his career, he became more and more concerned with the spiritual aspects of Islam. He advocated a radical Islam- ization of new knowledge. He recognized that the crisis of the modern world was the crisis of knowledge. And this crisis, al-Faruqi thought, could only be cured via a new synthesis of all knowledge in an Islamic epistemological framework. The “Islamization of Knowledge” project sought to arouse Muslims to become active participants in intellectual life and contribute to it from an Islamic perspective.